Week 3 post 2

Websites I visit frequently are:

Twitter- very effective because it allows for customers to be who they are and express their interests. You can change your home page, and add any background or picture to your profile. The fact that it allows for so much freedom is what makes me come back. The design of the website actually depends on each person, but the overall accessibility of it makes it easy to navigate and get to where you need to go.

Pendletonyardsales- This is a site for military members to sell their stuff, all kinds of stuff to people on different bases. This site just recently got updated and it is much easier to look at and not so overwhelming. This website uses the color green, probably for money-which people make money on this site a lot. The site has many categories of stuff, similar to ebay or craigslist but much safer, while there are still scams that can happen. It is left up to the customer whether they want to give out certain information. I visit this site because it is fun to look through the many things people want to get rid of. Instead of putting everything on the homepage, which was done before the update, the owner decided to spread things out on various pages for the customer to look through.

Google Analytics

One of the first thing that caught my eye was the visitors overview: where you can see returning visitors and new visitors. This would give me an idea of how well I am bringing people to my site, how many new people are here and how well I am doing bringing new people in. Another tool I saw was the In Page Analysis, which shows and assesses how visitors are interacting with my page. I think this would be useful because I can tune what is on my page based on what people are visiting. One last thing on google analytics is the Visitors flow, which allows me to see the path customers take when visiting my site. Are they skipping all the marketing and going straight to recipes or are they spending the time looking at what all I have to offer? This will help me know if my marketing strategies are working or if people are merely overlooking them.

Coupons

Coupons are my favorite, I love using them and I love how they are reoccurring for a lot of businesses. I would use coupons to give product after purchasing. I like the idea of buying one plate of food and getting the other for a few dollars, or even sometimes getting the other plate for free. I could not resort to the free plate however until my business is strong enough to control the flow of people. I would like to keep coupons in circulation because when people have a coupon, for the most part, they will end up coming back and using it! The only way to get the weekly coupon is to come in and purchase items.

Week 12 Social Media Tools

I think a marketing tool that will benefit my business is Groupon. This allows for people to receive promotions for coming and bringing friends to my cafe. I would want to promote this outside of social media sites as well because word of mouth is a good way to get things across to all kinds of people. I hope that in using Groupon people will also buy more products.

Flipboard is also another site I would like to explore and use for my business. It would allow me to blog and post photos that will bring in new people and keep old customers coming back for more. I would keep this updated every week so my customers can see the new stuff I am working on and trying to perfect just for them!

Yelp is one of the most helpful tools I have personally used. It allows for people to rate and comment about their experience at your business. It also gives location, menu, phone number and so much more. This of all the social media sites previously listed will be the most helpful. I hope that it will create a good rapport about my business and will bring new people in to experience the fun that others did.

Week 11 Comments

http://socialmediamilieu.blogspot.com/

http://clcsit155.blogspot.com/

http://eduardorandom.blogspot.com/

Week 11-Online Advertising

Online Ads, while as a consumer they get annoying, but as someone who wants to start a business I am looking for the best way to reach my target market without driving them away with annoying pop ups. One thing I do not like about the internet is the ability for anybody to put Ads out there that contain useless information and sometimes even viruses.

For my company I do believe that FaceBook can help me get to my target market in a few different ways. I want to utilize FaceBook Ads as the majority of my advertising because most of my family is on FaceBook and so are my friends; when someone likes my page or views my Ad, so will all their friends (or that is what I hope will happen). As a young member of society, I want to create a fun advertisement and draw people in rather than have people scrolling down exiting out of my hard work. FaceBook does cost, and it costs a lot. I would rather start out small so I do not have to put a lot of money into it AT FIRST. I will start out small by giving myself a small budget and seeing how well FaceBook works at reaching my target market.

By starting out small, I mean starting out on a $10 a day budget in hopes that it will get me the estimated 64 likes. 64 likes a day will take this small business a far way.

I tried playing around with the words in this Ad but for some reason it kept taking me back to the page where I am forced to enter my credit card. This still gives everyone an idea of what I want to do with my company. I do not want to limit my target market to a specific group of people, because everyone loves food.

Email Marketing

I think it would be efficient for my business to send out newsletters monthly because it will leave my customers looking for more and waiting for the next best thing. In these, I would like to include coupons, simply 5-minute recipes  and much more. Each newsletter would have a theme that I will stick in hopes of keeping my customer interested in my company. For example, one month would be party appetizers and I can use specific celebratory instances (superbowl, thanksgiving... and more) to go along with. I want my newsletters to be fun! I would love to include certain food facts or inside secrets on how to pick certain fruits, vegetables, how to wash the food efficiently and more.